openpolitics.com

The Federalist as “Medical Journal” in the Time of the Coronavirus

One consequence of the coronavirus pandemic is that we’ve all become amateur epidemiologists. This is partly owing to the failures of public officials. When Mayor Bill de Blasio declined to shut down New York City’s public schools, even after schools in Seattle and Los Angeles had closed, parents had to decide whether to keep their kids home anyway. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it was unnecessary to wear masks—and then, last week, told us to wear masks, after all—we had to find a YouTube tutorial and get to work. When President Trump told us the virus was “going to disappear—one day, it’s like a miracle,” we had to Google “warm weather and covid-19,” and see for ourselves that the relationship between the two remains unclear.

And then there’s the case of news publications, already endangered when the virus arrived. Many outlets have, over the last few weeks, either folded or suffered devastating blows. (On Tuesday, it was revealed that the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a newspaper beset by a long series of layoffs, would “no longer cover Cleveland.”) Meanwhile, surviving food, fashion, culture, and sports outlets—which were able to ignore bird flu, back in 2015—have had to ramp up their coronavirus coverage. Visit the ESPN Web site, and you’ll find a Q. & A. between Stephen Curry and Dr. Anthony Fauci. One of the top posts on the style blog Fashionista recently asked, “How Should We Think About Personal Style After This?” The pandemic prompted the firearm-enthusiast magazine Guns & Ammo to publish a Web piece titled “Buy Now and Be Prepared.”

Virtually every existing American publication is contending with the coronavirus, in some way, in its pages. But while some have figured out how to adapt their usual coverage to the virus, others have tried to transform into medical journals overnight. Lately, the Federalist, a conservative online magazine not known for its medical coverage, has been publishing pseudoscientific coronavirus takes by writers not known for their epidemiological expertise. Last Friday, the site published a piece by David Marcus, its New York correspondent, titled “We Cannot Destroy the Country for the Sake of New York City,” in which Marcus argues that the rest of the United States should go ahead and reopen, because the coronavirus is unlikely to spread to the suburbs and rural areas. (In fact, it already has spread to many such areas, including southwestern Georgia.) The same day, the site posted another misguided medical take, titled “Why Severe Social Distancing Might Actually Result in More Coronavirus Deaths.” This one was written by an anonymous author. (“The author is an academic physician and researcher at an Ivy League Institution in New York City,” it says, at the bottom of the article.)

What, exactly, does the Federalist want beyond clicks? It’s hard to tell. The outlet has been around since 2013, when it was co-founded by Ben Domenech, Meghan McCain’s husband, who, at the time, compared the new publication to Time magazine. But the site has never disclosed its ownership. (For years, the question “Who funds the Federalist?” has been a meme, prompting the site to sell T-shirts with the phrase “I Fund the Federalist.”) Among other curious and concerning decisions since its founding, the site endorsed Roy Moore, the scandal-plagued Republican candidate for Alabama’s open Senate seat, in 2017, “even if Roy Moore did what he is accused of doing.” (More than a half-dozen women have accused Moore of sexual misconduct—and many of them said that they were minors at the time of the incident.) For some time, as Salon reported a few years ago, the site had a tag dedicated to its coverage of “black crime.” Certainly, the Federalist enjoys tweaking liberal pieties, and engaging in crass and condemnable behavior. But, in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, its recent takes have seemed, even for the site, outrageous.

Given the obvious challenges of tracking down the anonymous Ivy League professor behind the Federalist’s recent argument against social distancing, I reached out to Douglas Perednia, a retired entrepreneur with a medical degree—he did residencies in dermatology and internal medicine more than thirty years ago—who had just landed his first piece on the site. On March 25th, Perednia published an article in the Federalist titled “How Medical ‘Chickenpox Parties’ Could Turn the Tide of the Wuhan Virus.” After the Federalist tweeted it out, Twitter, which has been cracking down on coronavirus misinformation, temporarily locked the Federalist’s account. I thought Perednia might be able to offer some insight into the Federalist’s editorial process. To my surprise, he invited me over to his house. I grabbed my P.P.E. and drove to his home, in Portland, Oregon, less than an hour from where I’ve been hunkered down. Before I could press the doorbell of his blue house with a gloved finger, Perednia opened it and gestured to two chairs in his tidy living room, which were next to a giant telescope. “Please have a seat,” he said. “I’ve measured these out six feet apart.”

Perednia, a bespectacled man in his early sixties with an earnest and gentle manner, pointed to a small pile of papers that was stacked on one of the chairs. “I washed my hands before I printed those out for you,” he said. One was the two-thousand-word manuscript of his Federalist article, in which he argued for infecting young people with the virus via a “controlled voluntary infection program.” (The infecting would be followed by quarantine until immunity could be confirmed.) He’d submitted it to a number of medical journals and blogs. “They all turned it down with no comment,” he said. He’d tried news sites next. The Times and the Wall Street Journal didn’t want to run it, either. A lifelong Democrat until 2018, Perednia said that he had ultimately tried the Federalist, almost at random. He’d never really read it, but it appeared to have a significant following. The site accepted his article the next day, no questions asked.

Within hours of the story going live, Twitter had locked the Federalist’s account, which had tweeted the story out to its quarter-million followers with the message, “It is time to think outside the box.” (Reddit also removed posts linking to the article.) Soon, the article was a trending topic on the site, where most commenters found Perednia’s idea absurd, dangerous, hilarious, or all three. “It’s hysteria,” Perednia said, of the response to his piece. He had received many angry e-mails and calls: “They said, ‘You want to kill people off’ and ‘This is ‘the final solution,’ ” he told me. “Someone on the Wonkette equated me with Dr. Strangelove.” A doctor in West Virginia said that he should have his medical license taken away. Andrew Lover, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, told the Times that Perednia’s article was “exceedingly ill-advised and not evidence-based in any way shape or form.” (Not all respondents have opposed the idea. A young management consultant in Spain wrote to Perednia, “I contact you after reading your article from the Federalist newspaper. We are also investigating the idea of Controlled Voluntari Infection. We are in contact with multiple GCC”—Gulf Cooperation Council—“countries governments that would be interested in exploring the idea further.”)

Perednia asked me to hear him out. He grew up in western Pennsylvania, in the nineteen-sixties, before vaccines existed for common illnesses. “Someone would get chickenpox,” he said, “and the call would go out in the neighborhood to say, ‘Look, is there anybody who hasn’t had chickenpox who needs to get chickenpox?’ The parents would say, ‘Yeah!’ You’d be invited over to play along with a lot of other kids.” This happened with measles and rubella, too. (“You didn’t typically have mumps parties for some reason,” he said. “I don’t know why.”) At age six, he’d attended these parties without protest. “Everyone was getting measles,” he said. “You didn’t want to get left out.”

This was the germ, so to speak, for the Federalist piece, which argued that a controlled-voluntary-infection program, focussed on infecting youth, would lead to “herd immunity” and help forestall economic collapse. Young people would get sick together, become immune, then reënter the workforce to keep businesses running—which, Perednia admitted, might require working a job they’d never worked before. “The idea,” he emphasized, “is to develop immunity in people who are at high risk of passing it on.” This was, he thought, the best option at hand. As he’d written in his article, “A mitigation strategy based on shutting down the economy is like asking society to hold its breath in order to keep from inhaling a toxin. It can’t keep up forever.” He went on, in his living room, “We can’t speed up the vaccine process and you can’t do intensive isolation forever.” (The journal Nature considered its own “radical” idea recently, weighing the pros and cons of infecting healthy people with the virus to speed up vaccine testing.) “In China,” Perednia added, after noting that things seemed to be getting better there, “you have the luxury of really locking people up.”

I asked Perednia how he felt about the Federalist’s editing. Had it been rigorous? He said they’d made three major changes. Chickenpox “parties” had been a mere historical footnote in his original draft. He’d suggested a less alarming—and less likely to be clicked—title: “Controlled Voluntary Infection Could Help Counter covid-19 and Revive the Economy.” Also, he said, “I didn’t call it ‘the Wuhan Virus.’ ” He’d written “covid-19.” (The Federalist has categorized its coronavirus coverage under the heading ‘Wuhan Virus,’ though exceptions are made: its recent writeup on the death of the “legendary American songwriter” John Prine called the cause “coronavirus.”) Perednia shrugged; despite these edits, he stood by the piece. (His editor, Joy Pullmann, did not respond to e-mails seeking comment.)

Perednia has a daughter in college but hadn’t mentioned his idea to her yet, despite the fact that she’s in the target demographic. “I probably should ask her,” he acknowledged. In the meantime, he tried pitching his controlled-voluntary-infection program to me, as I played the role of a hypothetical nineteen-year-old.

Perednia quickly got to the crux of the matter, as he sees it. “Either self-isolate and do what we’re doing now—which will bankrupt the next generation,” he said, or, “there is a program that the government operates, which, if you decide it’s appropriate for you, you can become infected voluntarily with the disease.”

“Where?”

“Wherever the program is hosted, by whatever entity is hosting it. The C.D.C., the Department of Health, the military. . . .”

“Can I go on a cruise ship?”

“A cruise ship is pretty isolated! It’s a great place to get the disease.”

“Should I attend dances?”

“You could do that. You could also take a swab and inoculate everybody.” He added, “You’ll pick it up from people at dinner, from people you’re talking to, from doorknobs, from contact sports—”

“What if I end up, like, really sick?”

“Once the hospitals become overwhelmed, you probably don’t want to do this,” he said. He acknowledged other concerns and unknowns, but described his proposal as “the least bad option.” Even roleplaying, it was a bit unnerving to consider.

A few minutes later, when I was on my way out—the door again opened by my thoughtful host—Perednia was still shaking his head over the response to his article. Perhaps he would have been better off publishing it in the Huff Post, he said. The outcry was more about the Federalist, he figured, than about his thesis.

In truth, it was probably both. The day before Perednia and I met, Andy Beshear, the Democrat Governor of Kentucky, had given a press conference on his state’s coronavirus outbreak, focussing on instances of poor decision-making. “This is the part where I, the person that tells everyone to be calm, have to remain calm myself,” Beshear had said. “This is one that makes me mad.” He explained that a young adult in Kentucky had tested positive for covid-19 after attending a “coronavirus party” for people in their twenties. “No more of these,” he said. “Don’t be so callous as to intentionally go to something and expose yourself to something that can kill other people. We ought to be much better than that.”

Although the virus continues to afflict the old and infirm more often than it does the young, an increasing number of young people who’ve tested positive are ending up in the hospital, and, in some cases, dying. Two weeks after our conversation at his house, Perednia was convinced that the way to adapt his idea to this reality was to make sure that the infecting was done with “the lowest possible dose” of the virus—a concept known as variolation—which, he thought, would cut the death rate among those who chose to take part. “Even without the addition of variolation,” he said in an e-mail, “the whole idea of CVI now appears to be ten times less risky than originally appeared to be the case.” Meanwhile, the C.D.C. continues to recommend social distancing, wearing masks, and washing hands often.

And the Federalist continues to post stories downplaying the “Wuhan virus,” celebrating the President’s response to it, and promoting unproved and outright dangerous cures and corrective behaviors. One of its most recent articles challenged, on constitutional grounds, the decision to close churches while leaving grocery stores open. This piece, at least, was bylined, and the author identified as a constitutional-law attorney, a fellow at Liberty University, and a senior legal adviser to the Trump 2020 campaign.